Project Morpheus Vs Oculus Rift

Oculus Rift vs. Morpheus: Is Virtual Reality Gaming Finally Real?

This week at the Game Developers Conference, Sony officially announced a virtual reality headset they’ve been working on for a while, called Project Morpheus. Naturally, this immediately led to comparisons between Sony's solution and the Oculus Rift.

While they are both prototypes and will change a lot before release, most of the people arguing from either side haven’t even touched either of the most recent versions of the devices, and therefore aren’t really in a position to judge. We wanted to take a look at the differences between these two devices from a specs and features perspective, to get a sense of how the two compare.

To be honest, there are a lot more similarities than differences in the two products so let’s take a look at that first. The newest Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus both have a 1920x1080 display, giving you 960x1080 pixels for each eye. Both have a series of accelerometers, a three-axis gyroscope, and rely on an external camera to do positional tracking. Both of them also have motion sensors that update 1,000 times per second. So where are they different? The rift has an OLED panel as opposed to the Morpheus’ LCD, and a 110-degree diagonal field of view, versus the Morpheus’ 90.One place where Rift is winning is with a technology they’re using called low-persistence display. This allows the screen to shut off for tiny fractions of a second between new images, and has been reported to dramatically reduce motion blur, judder and motion sickness in users. On the other hand, Sony seems to have a major advantage with their prototype on the audio front. They reportedly are using a technology that models the human ear to do true spatial sound, which might make a huge difference for audio realism. The Rift doesn’t come with any audio tech in the device itself, so you still have to wear headphones and rely on whatever sound the game itself normally delivers.

At the end of the day, competition and innovation in the VR space is a good thing, and something we're happy to see. Consumers will be the ones that benefit in the end, so more players in the market can only help. When these devices are finally released, there probably won’t be a ton of direct competition — Project Morpheus is going to be a PS4 peripheral, and only PC users will gain access to the Rift. This could change down the line, but when they first launch, that’s what we’re going to be dealing with.